More than a hundred migrants from the country’s Hindi heartland walking back home from other states had to spend 36 hours in an open field with their wives and children as officials of two Uttar Pradesh districts argued over where to quarantine them.

The 149 migrants — who had reached Meerganj in Bareilly district late on Monday afternoon — were finally admitted to an isolation centre in Milak, in neighbouring Rampur, on Wednesday morning.

Milak circle officer Dharam Singh confirmed that the migrants, who are from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar and had travelled from Punjab, Haryana and Delhi, had been taken to a quarantine centre.

The decision would have come as a relief for the migrants, after their wait in the field with over two dozen toddlers and 40 women, but underscored yet again the plight of these nowhere people.

Surat Ram Kushwaha, a labourer who had walked over 600km from Amritsar, where he works as a mason, recalled their 36-hour wait.

“We don’t have anything to eat or drink and are staying in an open agricultural field. There are more than 20 children, one to three years old, with us,” he told reporters on Tuesday.

“We had reached Meerganj in Bareilly district and were discussing which way to proceed. Some (local) villagers suggested we go towards Bareilly town; others said we should continue towards Rampur. While we were talking, police from both districts arrived and asked us to return to where we had come from,” Kushwaha said.

“My wife and two-year-old son are with me,” he said, adding that he had already walked 10 days since leaving Amritsar.

The road had forged new friendships. “Most of the labourers in this group were strangers to each other when we first met on the highways or by railway tracks. We would like to die in our villages in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar instead of Punjab, Haryana and Delhi, where nobody would even touch us in fear of getting infected by the coronavirus.”

Kushwaha’s home is in Gopalganj, Bihar, 800km from Rampur.

The officials of the two districts finally held a meeting on Tuesday evening. But it would be another 12 hours before the migrant group would be taken by bus to the quarantine centre in Milak, Rampur, on Wednesday morning.

On Tuesday evening, Rajesh Chandra, sub-divisional magistrate of Meerganj, told reporters the labourers had first entered Milak and then reached Bareilly.

“It was because of the lackadaisical attitude of the officers in Rampur that the labourers reached Meerganj. Nobody is allowed to enter any district in the state during the lockdown without a pass,” Chandra said.

Singh, the circle officer of Milak, had blamed Meerganj police. “Meerganj police stopped the labourers instead of quarantining them there,” he had said on Tuesday.

On Wednesday, he said: “The migrants have been taken to a quarantine centre where they will be kept for 14 days and then sent to their home districts.”

Rahul Kumar, a young man from Deoria, Uttar Pradesh, and part of the group now quarantined in Milak, said he had taken the right decision to start walking. “We travelled through Amroha and Moradabad in Uttar Pradesh. I think it was the right decision to start walking. I work as a construction worker in Jalandhar. Four of us from Deoria decided to start on foot last week but many stayed back in the hope that the government would make some arrangements for them to return home,” he said.

“Today, one of my friends (in Jalandhar) told me on the phone they had been asked to fill in a four-page form (for government transport). None of them is educated enough and so are not being able to register themselves. My friend said our contractor was demanding Rs 200 from each labourer to fill in their forms.”

A train from Jalandhar started for Lucknow on Wednesday. Awanish Awasthi, additional chief secretary, home, Uttar Pradesh, said it was one of the 67 trains which have been deployed to bring back labourers from the state stranded elsewhere.